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Digsby Puts Your Social Life in a Little Box

By Paul Boutin April 1, 2009 6:22 pmApril 1, 2009 6:22 pm

When I wrote about FriendFeed two weeks ago, a few readers asked me for a different solution to the problem of organizing all of their social networks. “You sent us to yet another Web site,” one wrote. “How about a social-networks organizer that runs on my PC’s desktop?”

The good news is there are several desktop organizers already available, all of them free. The bad news is the ones I tried disappointed me. They were either too complicated, too buggy, or both.

The sole exception is Digsby, a Windows applications that scans Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn for you. It will do the same for your e-mail and instant-message accounts, too. Digsby displays your entire social life in one window that looks like a turbocharged AOL Instant Messenger.

Digsby doesn’t just combine social-network memberships. It lets you reply to tweets, conduct Facebook chats, and answer e-mail messages from multiple accounts, all in one window. You can embed a Digsby chat widget on your own Web site, so visitors can talk to you from within your home page, as if you were a Comcast customer service rep.

For now, Digsby handles only a few social networks: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. By contrast, the more complicated Nomee desktop app can track over 100 known networks. But for many people, combining Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn along with their e-mail and IM accounts is enough.

Digsby’s strength is the simplicity and AIM-ripoff familiarity of its user interface. Check out the company’s screenshots. If you’ve used IM at all, Digsby makes tracking your friends’ online chatter painless.

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Gadgetwise is a blog about everything related to buying and using tech products. From figuring out which gadget to buy and how to get the best deal on it to configuring it once it’s out of the box, Gadgetwise offers a mix of information, analysis and opinion to help you get the most out of your personal tech.